Ill at ease with success or its defeat...aka Bankroll Issues and Fyoochah Goals...aka I have met the enemy and he is me - at a cash game.

Acknowledged once and for all: He did indeed get a great run of cards, and a virgin share of unicorn favor for one halcyon, if snub-nosed, week. Positive Spin Specialist that he is, he takes no small satisfaction in noting he played well enough through that run to create an opportunity to take shots repeatedly for a goodly long time. Loudly and with much gusto then: Yay He! And exhale.

By which I mean only to note; the past is the past. Unless of course, you are dimwitted enough to conspire to make it prologue. Which, droll though it sounds, I am.

To wit: Fuck being decisions oriented. I would like more results now, please.

In an either Herculean or Sisyphusian attempt - with the metaphor of choice depending entirely on how well you know me - to prove to myself that rush was not a fluke, I have antagonized a dormant Wrath, one both old and singularly unkind. As a result, I have suffered some uniquely obscene and contrived punishments of late. Were I a lesser man, I would nurse these soul scars in cowardly isolation, giving them no name and pretending I knew not the nature of my aches. But no, dear reader, that is not what you expect, and who am I to deny your hungry mouths their much desired suckling? Who indeed…

Rest easy, friends, for I now intend to afford my unnamed, unknown and unkempt enemies no small opportunity to take surreptitious joy via my heretofore published miseries. In fact, some of my more sadistic friends and allies may derive odd and dysthymic pleasures from the recounting as well. Worry not, comrades, I would but hold it over you; it’s a human fallibility I forgive, if only because I drink deep of the same draught.

Fuckers.

Put simply, I have been two-outered twice and three-outered  thrice (with Kat, Slb and D witnessing most of these occurrences) in the mid and late stages of my favourite haunts: the FTP 3.5k, 6k, and 9k. Any of those double ups puts me in the money heading into crunch time. No guarantee of success, but my point is, I am not talking about some desperation push with a shortstack that was done off by a guy who has him covered by a mile. No, I am discussing something far more sublime and unyielding: Providence, wearing the mortal guise of statistical correction. And fuck does the handiwork ache.

As previously promised, I’ll spare the details - a dollar is a dollar, after all, and I’ll be damned if I’m giving you one. The worst to date, witnessed by slb (just one day after he and Waffles decided to play Hatfield and McCoy) happened in todays 9k deep stack – my favourite tourney. AA v. A2c (small hint there for the eagle eyed). All in pre-flop, with me re-raising and demanding this mothafuckah call off 90% of his stack to see my hole cards, which he does, as I am praying he will. Was this an important hand? If I take his stack as we all know I was ordained to, I am in 2nd with 19 left. He went on to final table, finishing fourth I believe. As it was, I finished 19th out of 404, when the Heater is clearly over. So that’s something I guess. Still, hard to be definite about these things, but that was just about the most hideous thing I have experienced in poker. And it came after 3 hours of toil. I can’t bring myself to do the math on that hand but it’s gotta be something ridiculously sick. Tres triste, the French-Canadian I keep locked in my basement would say. Tres triste indeed, Jacques.

For completeness I should also note this happened after I got stacked (again) playing cash. Which brings me to my other bankroll note.  I am a lousy fucking cash game player. If you get a chance, sit to my left and let the good times roll. In trying to work off some of this huge fucking FTP bonus that is theoretically available to me, I lost a buy-in and a half at NL100. Punchline? Still didn’t get the next 20 bucks bonus released! Fuck it. Screw the bonus. I am scared shitless of cash games and refuse to voluntarily deplete my MTT bank machine now that it is equipped to see me through this current Sword of Damocles phase I am experiencing.    

The fault, as always, is with the player [why the fuck do we even play this game?]. In my case, I have learned I want to win worse now that I know I can win. Or at least chop. Not because I have suddenly realized I am a top tier player. I am not. But rather, because I have realized how democratizing the role of chance is. I am a pretty good, middle-of-the-pack player. From the rush I learned I can occasionally make the Big Call, and occasionally make the Big Laydown. What I now know that means is that if I just outplay those children who clearly are registering in tournaments with their milk money as a schoolyard prank or until the babysitter gets off her boyfriend, I will be very in close in chips to those stone cold killers. And the differential in skill will be thin enough that with a decent rush of cards, it will not be able to keep me from going deep again. Which gets to my future goals, for Ye Old Magical Wish Granting Blog to get working on next:

• I want to become a better decision maker when it comes to playing the flop


• I want to become faster at calculating my implied odds on draws and determining my move


• I want to increase my patience in those dead periods where I donk off my vital fluids on limps with no purpose


• I want to get better with AK and AQ


• I want to final table another MTT by the year’s end

• And perhaps most ambitiously, I want to learn how to play break even cash game poker so I can unlock some more of that hellish FTP bonus (still sitting at over 500 bucks!) before October 16th

Okay, not exactly the Magna Carta, but it’s still enough to strike fear into the gentry of rural Ohio. And that’s good enough for tonight.

Laytah.